Wolfowitz wasn't in the Jrn white house before 9/11. He came in once the 'Bush Doctrine' became the focus.

Chaney wasn't a neo con until after 9/11. During the first gulf war he said:

'I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home....

And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam [Hussein] worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq'

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

?

I and anyone else watching was very privy to the overtly obvious reason the decision to invade Afghanistan was undertaken. Two massive towers came down killing over 2700 people.

The Taliban were asked to give him up and they refused. They were going to defend him along with his band of followers.

They went after Bin Laden, and eventually they got him....being secretly defended by his organisation's partial patron pakistan.

Edited by Stirlingsays (03 Oct 2017 2.34pm)

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

Quite, whilst the Iraq war is questionable, the Afghanistan conflict really wasn't. The Taliban for whatever reasons weren't going to give up Al-Qaeda or Bin Laden, and in doing so, either were stupid, or miscalculated just how far the US were going to go after 9/11.

I don't think even Al-Qaeda thought they'd get anywhere near that kind of success - Although notably Al-Qaeda only put the finance up for 9/11 the planning and arrangement were done through an 'affiliate' to the Al-Qaeda brand.

Once that first tower came down full of US citizens, someone was going to have to explain why there was ten thousand US tanks parked on their citizens lawns - and any country that just backed down from that would be no country to belong to.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

It looks some some in Congress are trying to jump on this and strike while the iron's hot, while dismissing the "now's not the time" obfuscation for what it is. They face a strong headwind, so we'll see how that goes. I think the sheer number of victims - and the insane number of guns (23 in the hotel, another 19 at home) - might be a factor here.

It's the poster child situation showing the need for a gun registry and ammunition purchase registry. The shooter appears to have bought all his guns - and thousands of rounds of ammunition - legally, passing a background check along the way. But, if he had to register all those guns, there would at least have been a red flag flown high over his head. Why would a single man need over 40 guns? Why does one individual need a couple o' thousand semi-automatic rounds?

Think about it: 1 idiot tried to mix chemicals on a plane to make explosives, and now no one can take usable toiletries onto a plane. 1 idiot tried to blow up his shoes, and now we have to kick off our shoes to get through airport security. 1 idiot set his underpants on fire, and now we have to be subjected to a naked body scan or let a security agent feel us up. No one died in any of those botched attacks.

Here, 1 idiot stockpiled enough guns and ammunition to start a small war, and then shot nearly 600 people with them. That's the equivalent of the passenger capacity of three 737s. I think we can all handle the small inconvenience of registering guns in an effort to make this much less likely to be repeated; like the liquids bomber, like the shoe bomber, like the underpants bomber.

Of course, it would be a good first step simply to designate this as what it is: terrorism.

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

In fact Danny, as someone 'in the know' I was going to ask - massive number of casualties (killed and injured, though I imagine some of the injuries were stampede), does that surprise you, given the range from the hotel to the concert? What's the true effective range of automatic weapons?

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)